MSI GeForce GTX 470 Twin Frozr II review

A killer mid-range card nudging the high end

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Our Verdict

A killer card for the price, second only to the GTX 480 in Nvidia's 4-series Fermi line-up

For

Simply phenominal performance

Fantastic price point

Can find ref. cards for less too

Against

OC doesn't give a big performance boost

As with every generation of cards, the flagship sets sail before the hanky-waving crowds, and the slimmed down versions with slightly less capable GPUs follow in their wake. The GTX 470 came hot on the heels of the GTX 480, and with only marginally reduced architecture.

It first launched at £290, in what seemed like a direct attack on AMD's excellent HD 5870. That's proper, high-end, enthusiast pricing, and you'd expect pretty hefty performance for that kind of outlay. But price cuts happen, and never more explosively than with the GTX 470.

While you can plump for enhanced, 1.5GB versions with higher clockspeeds, this overclocked model from MSI offers sterling performance for just a shade over £200. Incredible!

To put things into perspective, that's almost a ton cheaper than its May launch price which, at this present moment, puts it right in the ring with ATI's new HD 6870, and makes it a much more attractive upper-mid range price prospect.

Under DX11, the GTX 470 happily trades blows with AMD's newer (and similarly priced) HD 6870, and comes away with a few more points under its belt.

It's an absolute monster in the DX10 stakes, happily cracking out awesome frame rates across the board, and it's happy as Larry at 1,920 x 1,080.

Price performer

If the GTX 470 was still squatting at £290, it would be no kind of contender. Competition breeds success, of course, but success also breeds competition, and this card competes – extremely hard – on price.

It's easily the most all-round powerful model in our ten-card test, handling DX10 awesomely and DX11 well, and it's now price-matched with AMD's latest upper-mid range card… which it outperformed in most games in our tests.

There's also the fact that you can actually pick up vanilla versions of the GTX 470 for far less than the cost of this overclocked card. We found stock GTX 470s for as little as £175 and if you're seriously considering plumping for a 1GB GTX 460 – and hey, who wouldn't? – we'd actually ask you to think very hard about investing an extra £35 for one of these instead.

It's not a great premium, when you consider the performance increase you're getting. In all honesty, the GTX 470 is closer to high-end than midrange, which makes it an enormously attractive prospect.

But if you do buy one, make sure you've got a nice, free-flowing chassis, because this fellow can get a little hot under the collar.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Contributor

Technology and cars. Increasingly the twain shall meet. Which is handy, because Jeremy (Twitter) is addicted to both. Long-time tech journalist, former editor of iCar magazine and incumbent car guru for T3 magazine, Jeremy reckons in-car technology is about to go thermonuclear. No, not exploding cars. That would be silly. And dangerous. But rather an explosive period of unprecedented innovation. Enjoy the ride.